Bram Cohen on the Future of BitTorrent
What's next for BitTorrent, a company that initially tried to establish a peer-to-peer-based download store for mainstream Hollywood, then aimed to help publishers distribute bits more effectively? BitTorrent co-founder and chief scientist Bram Cohen explained today …
Context & Ripple Effects
This GigaOM conversation is the second time Cohen has mapped the company's road in public — he gave a similar forward-looking interview to Wired back in 2006, when the Hollywood download store was still the plan. By 2010 the storefront-for-studios ambition has given way to selling publishers efficient bit-moving infrastructure.
The repositioning also lands in a changed ecosystem: The Pirate Bay said in 2007 it saw a future without BitTorrent, while Brightcove had already wired a BitTorrent stream into its video platform the same year — evidence the protocol was being adopted as plumbing by commercial distributors even as its pirate associations persisted.
First-order effects
- Publishers weighing large-file delivery now have Cohen himself making the cost case directly, with BitTorrent formally out of the retail-content business and competing as a distribution-technology vendor.
- The retreat closes the door on the studio-download-store model, freeing BitTorrent's engineering effort for the publisher-distribution product line.
Second-order effects
- Commercial content-delivery vendors face a cheaper peer-assisted alternative for bulky files, forcing them to defend pricing on bandwidth-heavy workloads where BitTorrent's architecture has its clearest advantage.
- Rights holders' lingering piracy concerns shape which publishers sign on, pushing BitTorrent toward customers whose content is less licensing-sensitive.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, protocols born in consumer file-sharing migrate up the stack into enterprise infrastructure, with their legal exposure shrinking as the company sells transport rather than content — a template other P2P-era projects may follow.
The trend: Protocol-originated companies are pivoting from consumer media storefronts to business-to-business distribution infrastructure, trading retail ambitions for bandwidth economics.